Yesterday, in a story about how Microsoft and Google are driving increased WiFi coverage in New York and San Francisco, I threw out a half-joke about political parties doing the same thing. To quote myself:

“It will be interesting to see non-tech companies sponsor a connection. Politics in particular could be great, with slogans like ‘A Hotspot for Romney’ or ‘ObamaFi New York.'”

As it turns out, political parties may not need to make this push themselves. People across the world have already turned their WiFi networks into political advertisements, the modern equivalent to raising an “Obama [or Romney] 2012″ sign in the front lawn. OpenSignal, an initiative to map cellular and WiFi signal strength around the world, has gathered this information from its database of 75 million geo-located routers and collected it in the map below.

View a fully-interactive version here. OpenSignal made the location of each network a little “fuzzy,” saying: “pitchfork-yielding mobs should not hunt down political opponents based on this map. Or any other for that matter,” the company wrote. Not that our readers are the pitchfork-yielding type. (I hope.)

Based on the 1140 political WiFi advertisements it found, OpenSignal tried to suss out some sort of “approval rate” for Obama across the globe. It’s not the most sophisticated method replete with datapoints, but it’s still a fun experiment.

The map is below. Dark blue represents a positive WiFi sentiment, while a country without any color is considered neutral under OpenSignal’s criteria.

OpenSignal on why Obama is much more on popular Wifi networks outside the US than he is within:

It may be that Obama is genuinely more popular in the rest of the world but maybe it is because outside of the US people are less likely to express negative sentiments towards politicians in this manner.

The company compared the rate of positive versus negative comments regarding Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and found that their hypothesis was correct – Argentinians were less likely than US citizens to criticize their political leader with their WiFi network.

It’s one little study conducted by a company that doesn’t typically involve itself in politics. Still, the number of people that use their WiFi networks to espouse their political beliefs surprised me. The Obama and Romney campaigns don’t need to sponsor with WiFi – their supporters are already more than happy to advertise their political views with their personal networks.

Facebook has introduced Scrapbook, a new feature that allows parents to share and collect images of their children in one place without requiring them to worry about tagging their kids’ face with each other’s names just to make sure they don’t miss what the other person has posted. [Source: Facebook]

“For all the clumsy rhetorical lip service [former Yahoo News head] Guy Vidra pays to The New Republic’s hallowed intellectual traditions, this is what his vision of a nimble digital news product finally translates into: a vaguely journalistic veneer strategically designed to conceal a rancid interior of ‘elevated’ advertising.”

Indian e-commerce company Flipkart is said to be raising $600 million in its latest bid to compete with Amazon. The company is also said to have garnered a higher valuation with this funding round — quite the feat, considering it was previously valued at around $11.5 billion. [Source: The Economic Times]

Here comes another unicorn: Sprinklr, a New York-based marketing company, has raised $46 million at a $1.17 billion valuation. The funds will be used to help the 700-person company expand its marketing platform. [Source: Fortune]

Curator, the tool Twitter created so the media could find and share tweets with its audience, is now available to the public. Because if there’s anything people wanted to see more of, it’s tweets randomly inserted into blog posts, television spots, and other forms of media. [Source: TechCrunch]

A court in France has decided not to ban Uber’s low-cost services until the country’s highest appeals court, or its supreme court, weigh in on the constitutionality of a new transport law. [Source: The Wall Street Journal]

Tinder is refocusing on its spam-fighting efforts in the wake of reports that movie studios are using the service to promote their movies, scammers are attempting to steal information via the app, and pranksters have created tools that trick heterosexual men into flirting with each other. [Source: The Verge]

Uber offers drivers whose accounts have been deactivated a choice: attend a class that requires them to pass an exam, or take a class that doesn’t. The latter has been informed by Uber employees, and the company has sent thousands of drivers to it, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Why is that a problem? Because Uber isn’t supposed to provide its drivers with formal training; doing so makes them bona fide employees, not independent contractors. [Source: BuzzFeed]

Flipboard users will now be able to collect articles and share them via private magazines visible only to members of certain groups. The feature is aimed at students working in the same class, companies sharing press coverage, and other groups that might want an easy way to share Web pages with each other without having to use public tools like Facebook or Twitter. [Source: Flipboard]

T-Mobile has tasked its customers with creating a real-world coverage map that makes it easier to tell where its service works and where it doesn’t. Instead of guessing at where its customers will get service — which is what other carriers do, the company claims — it’s asking people to verify its predictions so it can be more honest with consumers. [Source: T-Mobile]